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These Maps Show How Vast New Infrastructure Is Bringing the World Together

ICE Graveyard 18/04/2016Parag Khanna

SINGAPORE -- There's no better way to score points for gravitas in today's media than claiming that the world is falling apart. Just say on air that, "This is the most dangerous time since the peak of the Cold War," and witness your star rise. But such talking heads are responding to yesterday's news and extrapolating the worst scenarios, whereas the underlying trends seem in fact to point in a very different direction. If you want to understand the world of tomorrow, why not just look at a good map? For my new book, Connectography, I researched every single significant cross-border infrastructure project linking countries together on every continent. I worked with the world's leading cartography labs to literally map out what the future actually -- physically -- will look like.

It turns out that what most defines the emerging world is not fragmentation of countries but integration within regions. The same world that appears to be falling apart is actually coming together in much more concrete ways than today's political maps suggest. Major world regions are forging dense infrastructural connectivity and reorienting their relations around supply chains rather than borders. A peaceful world may emerge as a collection of such stable regions and continents. Follow the lines of connectivity on these maps to see how the Humpty Dumpty world is putting itself back together again -- much better than before.